


Shatterpoint

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [15]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Gen, Short One Shot, Taylor is Back, Ward Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-30
Updated: 2020-01-30
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:28:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22482601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: After Gold Morning, Taylor thought she might finally be able to be freed from all of this. Freed from capes, from fighting, from the unavoidable grind of world ending problems. She might finally be allowed to be a normal girl, average, without bullies or dead mothers or negligent fathers or the threat of a monster tearing apart her home.She was wrong, of course.
Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1435474
Comments: 6
Kudos: 126





	Shatterpoint

**Author's Note:**

> Massive fuck-you Ward spoilers here, just by the way. Like, I think this is 18.3 and onwards Wards spoilers. So don't say I didn't warn you, I guess?

In the end, they decided against staying near the east coast of America. Earth Aleph’s Brockton Bay had been a dwindling little rural town that had withered and died sometime during the eighties, and even if their hometown had been there, Taylor was pretty sure the memories of the east coast would’ve driven her and her father away regardless. Her mom - Annette, rather - was alive and married happily to someone who wasn’t an alternate Danny Hebert, and her father’s counterpart had died in a motor accident a month before he was to turn eighteen. 

There was no room for them over there, not anymore.

The government knew who she was, at least in passing. Maybe they didn’t know she’d been Khepri - though that was doubtful, there were enough photos on the internet of her as Skitter, as Weaver, and as Khepri, and it didn’t take Lisa to see the similarities - but they had known she was Weaver, and they were more than willing to let her and her father relocate to middle America, if only to make sure her face and the powers she no longer had would eventually fade out of memory, lost to time.

It had worked for a while, too. She went to university, got that teaching degree she’d always wanted to. Admittedly, she’d been talked out of becoming a pre-12 teacher, her advisor had cautioned against it when she admitted that she had a long and protracted history with bullying, but she was still on her way to becoming something that might, one day, resemble a professor. 

The impulses she’d dealt with since she got her power, the paranoia, the persistent need to be in control of things, they faded as well. Gradually, to be fair, it wasn’t an easy process and a lot of them had become compulsive, reactions to things that didn’t exist anymore. Some days she still woke up expecting to go to school, and other days she had difficulties telling faces apart, a lingering scar from her time as Khepri, partial face blindness that flared up whenever she was sick or overwhelmed. Tiny things, things she could cope with, things she could eventually find peace with. Even her missing arm wasn’t really as problematic as one might expect, though she liked to think of it as more of a reminder than something she needed to live with. 

Then The White Man appeared. As tall as a skyscraper, made up of a uniform white energy and brandishing something that resembled a lightning bolt, an unmoving monolith towering over the empty woods of Aleph’s Brockton Bay. Taylor wasn’t really sure _why_ Dauntless - and, unless Dauntless had a kid, that was her best guess - had become like that, nor why he refused to move, but... well. It happened. For all that it had terrified people, whispered words of another Gold Morning, nothing really changed afterwards, not for a while. Weak powers remained weak powers and the number of parahumans didn’t drop or rise in any significant margin. 

She’d been on her way to recovery, even with the occasional hiccup. The government stopped asking her questions, she stopped engaging in cape stuff, she _moved on_. It was freeing, honestly, in a way that she’d never really known. She’d been too young to know the feeling before her mother’s death, and afterwards it had been a combo of her father’s negligence, Emma’s bullying, and then her own criminal activities that had tied her down further. She had a future, for a time, one separate from powers and end-of-the-world crises. 

She really did. 

So when reality broke beneath her feet like too-thin ice, cracks of impossible void widening, opening into a maw, she couldn’t move away in time to avoid falling in. She fell, and she fell, and she fell. She felt her brain begin to burn, her eyes begin to blur, and her horror, her fear, the claustrophobia that had crept back into her system like a disease—she felt it all, and she knew.

There would be nothing left for her here.

Not when she stopped being Taylor Hebert.

* * *

Titan Eve stood, dark smoke billowing from her person. She was tall, a monolith that towered over the trees and the log houses, a long shadow stretching out behind her. Not Fume Hood anymore, Victoria reminded herself, letting out a breath. What would Fume Hood think of her, anyway? Would she be angry, upset? Did she even think that way anymore, or—

A crack. 

Both of the Titans responded to it. Oberon flinched to its feet, twisting towards it, while Eve just gradually swung herself around to look. The smoke thickened infinitesimally, Victoria knew she would’ve missed it if she hadn’t been looking for something, for any clue about what was going to happen. 

The crack, though. That was the issue. Victoria tried to focus on it, the widening gap. At an angle, it looked almost—almost like a hand-print, or at least like a flat surface that had broken from someone pressing their palm too hard into it. Her breath fogged in the air in front of her, the guns forgotten, no matter how much the tiny part of her head tried to go off on a tangent about how much she disliked them. Their presence should bother her more, but it didn’t, not when the crack was widening. 

Then something broke. The world twisted, shards of the sky and the ground falling away. A hand pushed through, followed by an arm. There was an odd effect to it, blue and gold stars with tiny threads between them covered every inch of the Titan, forming something close to a curtain, or maybe a membrane, which shifted with its own agency and gravity as the body moved. It was hard to tell what exactly was beneath the curtain, aside from its general shape, and focusing too long on any single star made her head start to ring and her mouth go dry. 

The figure continued to push through the widening crack, chunks of reality slipping out of the sky and shattering against the ground without making so much of a sound. Its shoulder, and head, were next, and like every other Titan it was faceless. There was femininity to it, admittedly, from what little she’d seen yet, even if the effect that misted around the body made it hard to notice, Victoria was almost certain that the new Titan had long, curly hair. The Titan rose, and rose, pushing and rising, demonstrably larger than its counterparts, larger than even what had become of Contessa—Titan Fortuna, or Kronos. 

It rose, and it rose, and it rose. A faceless thing, veiled by a starry sky, until finally the later half of it pulled free. It only had one arm, the other missing below the elbow. Its legs were off putting, odd in too many ways; they had three, maybe four joints, and were tipped at the ends, vaguely insectoid in appearance. The rest of its body kept implying femininity without showing it, slight breasts, all of this hidden under a veil of stars and connecting lines. Behind the Titan, still mostly inside of the crack, innumerable lines sagged outwards like a cape, connected to something unseen. 

Finally, the Titan stepped out and into the world.

Victoria glanced towards the other two Titans - Eve and Oberon - and found them motionless, locked in their aborted attempt to glance towards the Titan. Something soured in her stomach, nausea swirling, bracketing against her throat as a memory she didn’t want to remember wandered to the surface. There was an implicit sensation of limbs, of being the Wretch, of something controlling her, using her. 

The missing arm. The connected stars. 

Victoria was flying backwards before she could stop herself, panic - and not a small amount of fear - screaming away in her head. Behind Khepri - it had to be - the cloak started to go even further limp until, finally, a mass of humans flew out from the crack, connected by those thousands of lines. They fanned out, centered around a masked figure in the middle, the ones without costumes having flat, empty expressions, ones she knew well, _remembered seeing_. 

Titan Khepri reached out with her one arm, fingers opening so that her palm was splayed. Oberon began to shake, cracks not unlike the ones Khepri emerged from developed across the surface of his body as pieces of Oberon were pulled forward, others stubbornly stuck where they were. Khepri’s hands gradually closed, fingers tightening down into a fist, before she _yanked_ with a hard pull of her arm, Oberon shattering into millions of tiny, crystalline shards; fragments of a whole. The shards shot towards Khepri, the stars on her body lighting up as new connections were formed, millions of single red threads connecting to each piece. With an almost casual twitch of her shoulder, a portion of the shards were directed away, the bulk majority joining her veil as new blinking stars. Those Khepri didn't take into herself plummeted towards the forest and towards the mass of flying humans, some sinking into people and others making their way to places unseen. Those who got hit with the shards twitched, twisted, and then began to move. One man, bulky and old-looking, turned into an eight foot figure of roving static that Victoria couldn’t follow, a teenage girl started to fly, her silhouette turning blurry, indistinct.

Khepri was handing out powers. 

Some of the threads went lax and began to reel themselves in. A girl, barely Kenzie’s age, if that, flashed forward, flying down into the woods below, only to return with two new people, each one now capable of flight along with the rest. Victoria watched the girl, tracked the way she was brought to the center of the group—a Trump, maybe?

Khepri turned towards Fume Hood - towards Titan Eve - and raised her hand, the same as before.

Victoria couldn’t bring herself to watch. 


End file.
